Drug War Democracy
Radley Balko | March 19, 2008, 12:37pm
• In 2005, the city of Denver passed a ballot measure removing the criminal penalties for possessing less than an ounce of marijuana. But because possessing the drug is still illegal under Colorado state law, actual arrests for possession actually went up the next year.
Last year, the city of Denver passed another initiative calling on Denver police to make marijuana enforcement their "lowest priority."
Possession arrests went up again. In fact, they've jumped about 50 percent since 2004, the year before the first initiative passed.
• The New Hampshire house voted this week to decriminalize possession of an ounce or less of marijuana for personal use. Gov. John Lynch is likely to veto.
• Despite conceding at the time that overly aggressive drug laws contributed to the injustice done to Richard Paey—and admitting that he himself has smoked marijuana—Florida Gov. Charlie Crist announced this week that he has no interest in reform. “I feel that our laws are good in Florida," Crist said. "They were thoughtfully put in place.”
Mason Tvert | March 19, 2008, 2:53pm | #
I ran the initiatives in Denver so I can provide some insight here.
Generally, arrests have gone up because 1) other arrests/police stops have gone up, so more people are being found in possession, and 2) they were already going up. Arrests were trending up before we passed any initiatives, so in essence nothing has changed. And that is what we recently learned when we got the Denver City Attorney's Office and Denver PD to specifically admit they have changed nothing since passage of these initiatives.
So, arrests were already increasing, and they simply kept increasing. The question, then, is how do we get them to turn things around.
The problem is not so much the police as it is the city attorney’s office. The police are able to enforce state laws — don’t get me wrong, they don’t HAVE to enforce state laws, but they are able to.
The city attorney’s office also does not HAVE to prosecute these cases. In fact, they really aren’t supposed to be doing so. They are handling them under an agreement with the district attorney’s office, by which they are acting as deputized DAs.
After all, this is a city office prosecuting state charges (remember, it’s no longer a crime under Denver ordinances).
So the key is to get the city attorney’s office to stop doing the DA’s dirty work. This is exactly what we’re trying to do via the Marijuana Policy Review Panel established under the latest initiative. At the last meeting there was a recommendation proposed that directs the city attorney’s office to stop handling these cases for the DA. The panel will vote on it at its next meeting.
If the city attorneys stop prosecuting these cases, it will be up to the DAs to do it themselves. They clearly don’t have the time or interest in doing so, and if the cases are not being prosecuted, it would only make sense for police to stop wasting their time writing the tickets.
Then again, that would require the common sense of a 2nd-grader, so we’ll have to wait and see whether they put 2+2 together.
(I apologize for this being a bit choppy -- I was in a hurry, but wanted to give interested readers/posters this info)
